Canvey Island (32 page)

I do not want to be here
, I thought.
I did not ever think that my life would be like this
.

‘Come on, Martin, don't be squeamish. I'll just finish up round here. Give him a good clean round the back. The nurse gave me one of these plugs to stop him up. I don't mind what happens after we get to the crematorium, but we don't want him soiling himself after all our hard work, do we?'

Vi soaped Dad's legs and feet, then lifted his penis and washed around as if she was cleaning the edge of the bath.

‘Fetch his pants, Martin, there's a good boy.' She began to towel him dry. I put each foot through the holes in Dad's pants and then lifted him from the waist so that Vi could ease them on. We repeated the action with his suit trousers.

‘Do you think we need his braces?' Vi asked.

‘Well, he's not going anywhere,' I said. ‘But you'll know, won't you?'

‘Let's put his shirt on first. You can do the tie for me, can't you?'

I fetched the shirt from the chair. Although it had been laundered it still smelt of tobacco. The collar had worn and I wondered for a moment if we should buy a new one. Perhaps we should have bought everything new and clothed Dad especially for death.

‘Lift again, Martin, nearly done.'

I was sweating from the heat of the room and from the exertion of moving my father. My breathlessness was just as his had been.

Vi put on the left sleeve, passed the shirt round the back and I
put on the right. ‘Let's button him up while he's still upright otherwise we'll have to keep pulling it out from the back. Hold on, Martin.'

She began to do up the buttons and fetched the braces, clipping them to the front and back of his trousers.

‘Len never did like a belt. He thought it spoilt the look of the suit.'

Then she lifted the collar ready for the tie.

This is ridiculous
, I thought. I had to climb on to the bed and kneel behind my father with his head supported against my chest so that I could put on the tie as if I was doing it for myself. A black tie for Dad's own funeral. I kept the knot loose, Vi fastened the top button, and I tightened the tie to the neck. Then, while Dad was still upright, we put on his suit jacket.

‘You put on his cuff-links, Martin, and I'll find a handkerchief for his breast pocket.'

‘What about socks and shoes?' I asked.

‘His feet are too swollen for that. It's the top half that's important. Then I must do his hair. The oil's over here somewhere.'

I looked at my father's bare swollen feet, the trousers raised around his shins. It was as if he was about to do a spot of paddling in the sea. I pulled the blanket back over him and folded it down over his waist. I wondered whether we were going to have to clean Dad's teeth. Perhaps we were even going to photograph him like the Victorians did.

Vi lifted Dad's head and began to shake the oil into his hair, letting her fingers run through the grey-black strands. I noticed that she had taken her gloves off.

‘There you go, my darling.'

It was as if Dad was alive but a child again and she was soothing him to sleep. She fetched a comb, parted his hair and began to brush it back. Then she reached into her handbag and took out her compact and blusher.

‘He looks a bit pale, doesn't he? I'll just put some colour back in his cheeks. I know it's silly but I'd like him with us a bit longer.'

I took off my gloves and washed my hands. I didn't want the smell of death to remain: gases, ammonia, carbonic acid, nitrogen.
I wanted to phone Claire. I wanted to be anywhere other than in that room.

‘I feel we should pray,' Vi said, ‘even though your father said he never believed.'

What?
I thought.
Just in case we can get him in at the last minute?

‘We might find it a comfort. We don't have to say anything out loud.'

She sat beside my father and took his hand once more. I stared out of the window because I did not think I could continue to take in the sight of my dead father, dressed in his Sunday best, waiting for his funeral without his socks and shoes.

Outside an elderly couple were standing at the bus stop. Perhaps they had just finished visiting a friend and were wondering how long it might be until they too ended up in the home. Perhaps they were thinking which of them might die first. As I watched them I thought of my own marriage, and Claire's words to me on our honeymoon. She had turned to me and said: ‘I hope I never see you dead.'

I opened the window. For a moment I did not want to turn round. If I did so then everything that had just happened would be true.

‘It's all right, Martin,' Vi said. ‘I think I'm ready now.' She stood up, took off her apron and put on her jacket. ‘The undertakers will be here soon.'

I looked at my father and could hardly remember him being alive: sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and a plate of shrimps before it was light; tapping the packet of fags to release a cigarette; shifting in his chair before the look of surprise came to his face when he remembered a joke.

Now he lay waxen and still before me. There was nothing between me and my own death, no protecting grace.

Despite the drained pallor of the features. Dad's face began to glow in the diffused light of death. I thought that I should probably kiss him but I didn't want to say goodbye. I remembered the last joke he had told me, of a wife moaning to her husband, ‘I think you love Tottenham more than you love me,' and the man replying, ‘Don't be daft, I love Hartlepool United more than I love you.'

The undertakers came to zip him in a bag and take him away.
Mrs Harrison arrived with some of his possessions. ‘These are his things: a few photographs; his watch and dentures. You can wait in the conservatory. I'll make sure you're not disturbed.'

‘Is that what people do?' I asked.

‘It's best if the undertakers get on with it themselves.'

I sat with Vi in the Lloyd Loom chairs and looked out at the sea view. In the distance, a man in a rugby shirt was skimming stones, teaching his boys to do the same, ignoring the black Labrador who was still waiting to chase a stick they had forgotten.

‘You should have his stuff, Vi,' I said.

A coffee-pot without a spout
A cup without a handle,
A tobacco pipe without a lid,
And half a farthing candle
.

‘What's that?'

‘Something I used to sing with your mother. About our dad:

My father died a month ago
And left me all his riches;
A feather bed, a wooden leg,
And a pair of leather breeches
.

‘I should give you these while you're here …'

‘What are they?'

‘They're just photographs. From the attic in the old house. I gave them to Dad.'

I handed her the envelope but she didn't want to look.

‘Oh,' she said. ‘George and Lily.'

‘Did you take that?'

‘I've never seen this one before.'

‘And the baby is me?'

‘I suppose it must be.' She was still hesitant. ‘Lily must have kept it. You with the two of them. I thought all these had gone in the flood.'

She started to put them back in the envelope but stopped. ‘And, look, here's one of me when I was young … and my wedding …
George … and one of Len too. He always was a looker. And he could dance; for a small man he could dance so well. All those nights upstairs at the Casino or over at the Kursaal. On a clear night they didn't close the curtains and you could see the stars over the sea. We were almost the same height and that helps when you're dancing, you can keep close, cheek to cheek rather than cheek to chest; a man doesn't have to lean down so much.'

She gave me back the photographs. ‘You keep them. I don't need them.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘I like to think of the last time we danced together. We'd had such a happy time with the champagne and the memories and we just danced into and away from each other. He was so proud of me. He even laughed when I swapped my high heels for dancing shoes. “Still going strong then, Vi …” he said.

‘I told him I was the last of our generation to wear them. I've always had good legs. They're the last things to go south. I even told your Claire that.

‘Len laughed when he saw my shoes but I knew he was proud. “Amazing you don't fall over.”

‘“I can keep my balance,” I said. “And I still find them comfortable.”

‘“I love a girl in high heels,” he said and I shivered. I was still a girl to him. Always a girl. I'm going to keep remembering that.'

‘You loved my father, didn't you?'

Vi waited. ‘Oh no, I didn't love him,' she said. ‘I adored him.'

I heard about Martin's dad. Dave and I even went to the funeral because we knew there wouldn't be that many people there. It was the kind of event the word ‘smattering' had been invented for. A tape recorder on the back pew was playing old ENSA hits when we walked in: ‘I Cover the Waterfront', ‘Hey, Good Lookin' and ‘She Does It All For Me'. We sat halfway back on the left behind an old couple who weren't sure they had come to the right service. They kept looking round every time anyone came, in the hope of recognising someone, anyone, and finally decided that it would be easier just to ask us. We tried to be discreet because I didn't want Martin's wife seeing us. Ade turned up, which was good of him, and someone from the Navy, and Vi sat in the front on the right in her black hat and veil, the smartest person in the crematorium, a new leather handbag matching her shoes, her lace handkerchief at the ready.

Martin read from the Book of Revelation.

I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea
.

God
, I thought,
I bet it didn't take you long to choose that
.

Then he gave a tribute to his father, talking about the times when they'd gone out fishing when he was a boy and how they were more friends than father and son. He talked about how Len was amused by his granddaughter, and how supportive he had been to Claire when she'd had post-natal depression, and I wondered whether any of us really needed to know all that. Then one of the old boys' hearing aids kept going off and he
couldn't stop it so anything Martin said was accompanied by high-pitched whistling.

The priest stood up and said that Len was ‘one of life's great characters', which meant that he didn't know that much about him, and that ‘the genial fisherman we all knew and loved' would live on in our hearts and prayers.

He told us that the people from the home had set out refreshments and that we would all be welcome to join them afterwards. Dave said he'd rather give it a miss. I didn't know whether it was the thought of the old people's home or the presence of Martin but I wasn't going to disagree. It was good enough of him to come as it was.

We both found it depressing, not just because it was a funeral and the end of an era, Len being the last of our parents to die, but because the service was all so matter of fact, not like the funerals we'd known after the flood. We were only in there for about twenty minutes and the next mourners were already queuing up when we came out. It didn't seem right.

Dave was still a bit distracted when we got back to the boat and I could tell it was because we had seen Martin.

‘Do you miss him?' he asked.

‘Of course not.'

‘And do you still love him?'

‘No, Dave, I love you. You don't have to ask.'

‘Then I won't any more. It was seeing him again …'

‘He won't be back,' I said.

‘And you?'

‘Oh, don't you worry about me. I'm quite strong. You know that.'

‘Strongest girl in the world, you are.'

Ours wasn't a complicated relationship. We didn't have any great hopes or dreams any more. ‘Life when the lust goes,' Dave called it. Once he was going to be the next Pete Townshend and I was going to be a great painter, but after all the drink and the setbacks and the failed ambition we had decided to live a simpler life, messing around in boats, earning money hand to mouth, surviving however we could. Sometimes friendship can last longer than love.

It was one of those rare days when even the weather was hopeful.
The tide was going out, water fizzing through the channels, the sea curling away from the land.

‘Let's take the boat,' Dave said. ‘Get out of Canvey for a while.'

‘Where shall we go?' I asked.

‘It doesn't matter, petal: canals, rivers, a bit of sea, who knows? We could even do the waterways, just the two of us.'

‘You mean now?'

‘What do you say?'

He started to untie the boat and threw the rope on the deck. Then he jumped back on board. ‘Do you want to take the tiller?'

‘We'll take it together,' I said. ‘Is that all right?'

‘Then let's see where the water leads us. I don't care where we go provided we have each other.'

A swift darted up in front of the boat and circled away. I stopped for a moment, taking everything in, knowing that I was happier than I had been for a long time. I listened to the knocking and the ringing of ships' rigging, to distant traffic, and to the last cries of the oystercatchers, singing on the wing. I could hear a radio playing in the caravan site, I think it was Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry singing ‘Seven Seconds', and I stood there with a light breeze on my face, listening to the music, letting time come to me.

Dave started up the engine.

‘Straight on till morning?' I asked.

Once we were away from Canvey and all that was past, I would start painting again. I didn't know what. I didn't care. But I knew I would reduce my life right down into what could be trusted and known, and that I would be free, guided, as I had always wanted to be, by currents and tide, moon and stars.